Efforts to protect children in foster care from being inappropriately medicated with powerful antipsychotic drugs got a big boost forward on Tuesday, when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed three bills into law designed to reform prescribing.

Overprescribing of psychiatric meds for foster youth is a persistent problem nationwide, with children given the drugs at double or triple the rate of those not in foster care.

In 2011, the federal Government Accounting Office found nearly 1 in 4 children in foster care was taking psychotropic medications, which include antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers and stimulants.

By the time DeAngelo Cortijo was 14, he had been in more than a dozen foster homes. He had run away and lived on the streets for months, and he had been diagnosed with bipolar and anxiety disorders, attachment disorder, intermittent explosive disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder. He had been in and out of mental hospitals and heavily medicated.

Cortijo, who was born in San Francisco, was taken from his mother after she attempted suicide when he was 3.

After his later diagnoses, he was prescribed a combination of antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, and was told that taking them was his only hope of being normal. Instead, he said, medication made him feel “doped up and completely lost.”

The release in late March of an alarming new report by federal investigators has confirmed in shocking new detail what has been known for years: Poor and foster care kids covered by Medicaid are being prescribed too many dangerous antipsychotic drugs at young ages for far too long — mostly without any medical justification at all. The report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General examined in depth nearly 700 claims filed in 2011 in five of the biggest prescribing states — California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York — and discovered that two thirds of all the prescribing with these popular and costly “second generation antipsychotics” (SGAs) raised high-risk “quality of care” concerns.

Antipsychotics are the top-selling class of drugs in the United States, with sales of $14.6 billion in 2009 alone. Their use in children and adolescents in the United States is increasingly prevalent — and children in foster care are among the most likely to be medicated.

A recent 16-state study from Rutgers University on the use of antipsychotics in children and adolescents covered by Medicaid found that foster children received antipsychotic medications at a rate almost nine times that of other children covered by Medicaid.

The high expenditure on antipsychotics and other psychotropic drugs by the government has triggered a Government Accountability Office investigation into their use in foster care.

A segment on tonight’s episode of Need to Know, produced by myself, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Shoshana Guy, investigates the use and potential overuse of these medications on foster children, with a special look at the State of Texas.

The program follows a 12-year-old in the process of being adopted. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by the age of five. Just up to a few months ago, he was on five different psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotic Zyprexa. Yet now that he’s with his adoptive father, he’s been reduced to taking just one drug, for Attention Deficit Hiperactivity Disorder.

Our segment explores the question: why such a radical change?

The Need to Know segment airs tonight [aired January 2011] at 8:30 on WNET in New York; check local listings for the broadcast in your area.

The project received support from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, as well as the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting.

WHISTLEBLOWERS WANTED

CCHR is looking for anyone who knows of incidents of fraudulent prescribing, failure to follow Texas drugging guidelines for children or who has knowledge of illegal referral fees or kickbacks in the drugging of Medicaid children to come forward.

This includes knowledgeable employees of DFPS and HHSC, staff of any local office or clinic, any contractor, foster parent or citizen with knowledge.

Please use the short form below to get in touch with us and someone from our office will contact you. Your information is held in the strictest confidence.

Texas Psychiatry News

Abused children in Texas are being left in psychiatric facilities longer than they were six years ago as the state’s child protective services system grapples with federal court scrutiny and diminishing options, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. Last year, 17,151 Texas children were removed from abusive homes. While the agency could not say exactly how […]

Houston police found the 16-year-old foster child in a park in early November 2013, just a few days after she ran away from a residential treatment center in northwest Houston. Rosario, a baby-faced, black-haired girl who carried a little extra weight, said she’d been selling her body for money. The cops returned her to the […]